I think the people talking about climate denial are missing the real star attraction here - the LA fire dept competence denial is the important thing to see. See, the point of denial isn’t to actually convince people that climate change isn’t happening, it’s to weaken the evidence down to something ignorable if you want to ignore it.

The Unwoke Right make some bullshit claims about LA firefighters being defunded and incompetent due to DEI blah blah, and the Left debunks those claims but most people who see the Right’s claims will also see the debunking of all the claims they saw, so there’s a plausible possible alternative explanation that people can assume explains the fires if they want to. They can tell themselves “the fires aren’t getting worse, the LAFD is just getting less competent, those people aren’t dying from climate change they’re dying from DEI”.

Plus, a lot of people subscribe to the “if there’s smoke there’s fire” logic, and the Right have built a giant smoke machine on the whole “LAFD DEI” thing. Even if they’re all debunked, determined deniers can assume there are undebunked claims that they haven’t seen.

There’s a reason they don’t have these devastating fires in Sweden or Finland…

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/08/27/why-is-lapland-on-fire-finlands-far-north-set-for-record-breakingly-hot-summer

In Finnish Lapland’s Inari region, locals and wildlife have suffered 17 fires this summer so far. Timo Nyholm, duty fire officer at the Lapland Rescue Department, has said that’s well above the seasonal average of 10. He expects the summer total to blaze past 20 fires.

…

"Climate change is extending the fire season,” FMI researcher Outi Kinnunen told YLE News.

“As the climate warms, snow cover diminishes earlier, summer temperatures rise, and land surfaces become drier, even though overall precipitation is expected to increase.”

…yet